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And I felt compelled to do it again. I let out a little cry of frustration as I obeyed him. “You know, forcing me to do what you want makes you a bully.”

“Hey,” said Vincent. “Damian, come on.”

Damian shook his head. “No, you do not get to act like you’re the good guy here.” He turned to look at me, over his shoulder. “Is that how he portrays himself to you, Leo? Like he’s the good guy? You know what this piece of shit has done his whole life, though. You saw the rotating door of girls in and out of his bed. You know that he slept with my wife. You know that ever since we were kids, I’ve been the one who had to be responsible, while he was the one—” Damian swung his face back to his brother. “You were the one who had fun.”

Vincent let out a breath. He shifted his coffee from hand to hand. “Damian, I never protected you back then, and I should have. I was the big brother, and you were just a kid, and I was all you had. But I trusted the adults, I guess. And I was jealous.”

“Jealous?” Damian shook his head. “Well, at least you admit it.”

“I realize now, it was nothing to be jealous of. I realized it years ago, actually, while we were teenagers, that whatever it was they had done to you, they hadn’t done you any favors. I realized that if I’d figured that out earlier, I could have stopped them from getting their hooks so deep into you. But that’s why they chose you, in the end. Because you were a defenseless kid. They could turn you into the cyning they wanted you to be, and no one would say that they were taking up too much of your time. No one would say that you should have time to be a kid without all that responsibility on your shoulders. No one would object. They knew I was too young and stupid to do it and Aunt Mabel and Uncle Bill were too busy and stressed.”

“You were not jealous that I was the cyning.” Damian dismissed this flatly.

“I was.”

“You never wanted anything to do with it, though! You made fun of everything that I had to—”

“Because I was jealous,” said Vincent. “And I’m sorry. When I look back at all the ways I failed you when we were kids, Damian, I’m ashamed of myself.”

I spoke up. “You were a kid, too, Vincent. You were older than us, but you were still a kid, and you’d just lost your parents.”

Damian turned to me. “Oh, I see how this is. Is he the one who was feeding you all that nonsense about how I’m not actually the cyning?”

“Everyone thinks that, Damian,” I said. “No one really believes our dead ancestors are communicating with us through markings to show us the chosen one! This is not Harry fucking Potter.”

Damian was stung. “I know you’re angry with me, and you think I let you down, Leona, but I have been a very good cyning.”

“Of course you have,” said Vincent. “Neither of us would argue with that. It’s only that being a cyning has consumed you. It’s taken you over, and it’s asked too much from you. So, how could you possibly have anything left over after that? And to ask a kid like you to also take on the burden of a scent match? No wonder you bit out of it, just to escape. I get it.”

“That is not what happened.” Damian looked at me and then he looked at Vincent. “Biting Opal was not a choice. She lured me up there under false pretenses, are we all forgetting this?”

“No,” I said. “No, I know she played her part. But you could have stopped it, and you didn’t.”

“I’m not here to talk about the past,” said Damian. “I’m here to talk about this, right here, right now, where my brother is stealing you from me.”

Vincent swallowed. He looked down at his coffee cup. He didn’t say anything.

“I’m not being stolen,” I said.

Damian ignored me. He glared at his brother. “Nothing to say for yourself?”

Vincent met his gaze. He shook his head and then he looked back down again.

“What the hell?” I said. “You’re not doing anything wrong, Vincent.”

“He knows he is,” said Damian. “You don’t want me? Fine. But you can’t have my brother.”

Vincent licked his lips. “Damian… it would be one thing if you and I were close now, but you’ve practically cut me out of your life—”

“That’s because you’ve been sleeping with my wife,” said Damian. “This is just a pattern with you.” He turned to look at me. “Leo, can’t you see? It’s not even about you. It’s just about him wanting to hurt me.”

“I don’t want to hurt you,” said Vincent. “I admit, the things I keep doing, they hurt you, but it’s not the reason I do them.”

Damian scoffed.

I turned that over and over in my head and I tilted my head to take Damian in. I thought about Opal’s little manifesto. It wasn’t a plan, she wrote. I sighed heavily. “Hell, maybe it’s always that way.”

Both brothers turned to look at me.